Women offer a mixture of flowers and water during a Hindu Teej Festival honoring Bhutanese and Nepalese women Thursday in Aurora.

Saraswati Homagai joins women decorating their foreheads with colored rice during a Hindu Teej Festival honoring Bhutanese and Nepalese women in Aurora Thursday. Global Bhutanese Community Colorado hosted the celebration of purification and marital bliss. Married women prayed for happiness with their spouse, and single women for a good husband.

AURORA — In flaming red and pink saris expressing their happiness, Hindu women of local Bhutanese and Nepalese communities celebrated the Teej Festival of purification and marital bliss Thursday in Lowry Park in Aurora.

Through prayer, devotional songs, dance, feasting and other celebratory rituals — following days of fasting — married women sought happiness with their husbands. Single women petitioned for good husbands.

The festival, where women are joined by their families, honors the Goddess Parvati and commemorates her union with Lord Shiva, whom she impressed, it is written, by keeping fasts.

Acharya, who came here from Nepal about three years ago, is part of a substantial settlement, estimated at 3,500, of Bhutanese refugees in Colorado. They began arriving in significant numbers after 2008, according to information from the Asian Pacific Development Center.

The location of the festival, sponsored by Global Bhutanese Community Colorado, reflects the concentration of the group in Aurora and along East Colfax Avenue, although they are living throughout the Denver metro area, spokesman Bashu Khamal said. Sher Mizer, project coordinator for GBCC, said more than half the local population practices Hinduism.

According to Amnesty International, ethnic groups of Nepali and other origins living in Bhutan, a country of 650,000 located between India and China, began fleeing to Nepal and India in the early 1990s to avoid imprisonment or torture. They had been branded as anti-nationals in Bhutan because of their public demonstrations protesting their treatment by the government.

Increasing numbers have left the refugee camps in Asia in the last several years to resettle in the U.S. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands.

Many have made their new start in Colorado, and Thursday in Aurora was “a day of joy and togetherness,” festival organizers said.

Khamal said Teej is typically celebrated in the open, usually with monsoon mud fashioned into a pedestal symbolizing a Hindu temple. It is heaped with flowers, fruit, colorful fabric, incense and other bright offerings “pleasing to the gods.”

The Hindu women in Aurora made do with a cardboard box and a centerpiece of mums instead of sculptured mud. Yet there was no shortage of offerings. Bowls of colored rice paste were smashed on foreheads to bring good luck. Live flames danced amid countless plates laden with flowers and fruits. Dollar bills were strewn underfoot. And the joy in all of it seemed boundless.

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